You are welcome to embed this video, download it for personal use, or use it in a presentation for a conference, class, workshop, or free online course, so long as a prominent credit or link back to Edutopia is included. If you'd like more detailed information about Edutopia's allowed usages, please see the Licenses section of our Terms of Use.

Every day, you go boldly into your classrooms and face a room full of expectant kids. Or bored ones, or nervous ones, or hungry ones, or excited ones. You must find a way, for those few precious hours, to be their guide, their entertainment, their support, their leader. Wherever you are coming from, wherever they are coming from, you must meet in the middle and make magic happen, because you are an educator -- driven by the belief that you can make a difference in the life of a young person.

Here's to you for dealing with meltdowns; for celebrating small victories. Here's to you for coming in early and staying late; for giving your all for your students, so that the magic of learning can be sparked in their hearts. Here's to you for bringing love to every kid's life. In honor of National Teacher Day -- and every day -- Edutopia salutes you!

I am the biggest fan of teachers like all of you! We knew we couldn't show even a fraction of all that you do every day in a short video like this, but it was great fun to try to capture a little taste of the passion and the power of an educator -- teachers are AMAZING!!

Hi Joanne ~ I'm so glad we were able to offer a little inspiration! The graphics on the video were hand-drawn by our visual designer Cait, and then layered on the video and animated by our video editors Daniel and Doug, using an Adobe program called After Effects. After Effects is in the same family as Photoshop, but meant for video graphics.

It would be tough to recreate this exact look easily without some serious motion graphics skills, but some video editing programs have artwork built in that you could layer over the visuals.

I don't know what resources or skills you already have, but here's an article from Mashable with some resources to get started with animation.